(19 new replies.. *sigh* 20 now.)
That mail server was an hack-job. A fuckup in that area wouldn't surprise me the slightest. Hell, whoever used that laptop may have synced the mailbox without noticing. Very easy to do with outlook, and very easy to overlook.
Email is very new thing (yes, even though it's older than even me) and best practice with not just that but
all New Media is still playing catchup to bring it into line with legislation, and legislation (even more slowly) into line with it.
I have a book here, dated 2003, looks a bit of a Vanity Publishing thing (professionally made, but not a mainstream publisher, doesn't have a bar-code) which is called "E-Mail Rules" and subtitled "A Business Guide To Managing Policies, Security,(oxfordcomma!) And Legal Issues For E-Mail And Digital Communications". Nancy Flynn and Randolph Kahn Esq. ISBN 0-8144-7188-9, in case you fancy looking for it yourself for some obscure reason. I
have read it (248 pages, including all appendices, but not the index) exactly once, but in my business at the time I was given it (probably at a business seminar sponsored by businesses such as the Business Management company that seems most associated with the book) we were forming our own policies and procedures to be used in our company in its handling of very highly confidential data (personal medical information, plus the raw background of high value business data by the various clients, all competitors of each other) that had to be handled under any number of regulations by the FDA in the US, the MHRA (and predecessors) in the UK, EMA in Europe, TGA in Australia and many other bodies...
All the data had to be both secured for future use (backreference should it be required for any readon) and secured
from unauthorised access (competing firms, both of us and of any client, third parties with their own axes to grind and internally from alteration or corruption (intentionally or otherwise) by our own staff. A lot of cash and expertise went into this, and it
still could not stop someone causing us problems by doing something silly.
Data restoration was doable, perhaps with loss of a day's work if it wasn't more insidious damage. Dearchival was ok but gone was the time when a dozen years of past data on (as I calculated at one time) 0.75TB of DAT and DLT tapes, later also CDRs, in one fireproof safe
1 that could contain
all our backups. But what we could do to 'undo' a leak? Rewind time?
Never had one of those latter situations (severe enough for me to get to know about) whilst I was working there, but there was no practical way of stopping it, even with the multinational firm's rather condiderable IT budget behind the effort.
Enough of that, thougj. What about Hillary?
Sounds to me like she was the effective CEO of a relatively
small 'business'. The might of the US government, aside, her own staff numbered pretty low, and with all the traditional campaigns against Federal expansion (and proven problems with infrastructure projects of a Federal scale, even if they
could Pork-Barrel it), I'm confident that it was never going to be any other option other than Hillary asking her PA if she knew anybody who could set up an email system, and it ended up being delegated to the nephew of a friend of one of the junior staffers, who got a quick and dirty system in place. There
are regulations that should have probably been followed more carefully (also 'good governance' principles), but it seems it didn't bother anyone in the Dubya Bush administration, either.
And now what are the complaints? The keeping of the emails from the authorities... Probably breaking some statutary disclosure rules (that were written long prior to anything could be disclosed that was not handwritten or typewritten on dead tree stuff), but not any more maliciously than anybody else who has been mentioned. Seemingly breaking some confidentiality rules, which is a fault of the individual person who opened it out to the wider world unwisely and not
all to be laid at Hillary's door (given that it is third-, and maybe fourth-party readers/storers of the emails that have revealed this information, likely beyond the imaginable expectations ofnthe core Hillary camp). And it was most definitely
not Hillary who orchesteated the hacking of the unconsidered trifles out of the half/fully forgotten duplicate stores of data. Blame for having left security holes unplugged is hard to be harsh about, given that holes would have been sought until some were found.
As to the contents, I've seen worse (also, above, there's
reported worse. I also expect worse, from within a small group trying to do what is necessary to bend the world to their collective vision of what needs doing.
Naivety is the worst charge I would place at her camp's door. Fairly bad, but not "Lock Her Up"-worthy. And I bet her systems (internal or external to government) are pretty sharply closed right now, and getting even more so in the future.
(Plus there's the total contrariness of those who complain that the information involved was
both too private
and too unsecure. Depending only upon which lever they find easier to pull to get the AntiHillary machine to lumber forward a few more inches, temporarily.)
The worst thing is that I'm wasting time talking about it, and details of my old job, rather than getting on with work that is both relevant to myself and my own future... Darn you, Trump! You're potentially ruining my life! And I don't deserve any of the blame for that myself, no siree!
1 Yes, there was an off-site backup, not quite so duplicated as the "Full backup once a week, diffetential backups every weekday night, one-off backups of data about to be 'final copy archived' and the whole lot refreshed on a five year cycle to ensure tape-rot never irrecoverably set in".
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1412500 times)